SWF 2020 starts tomorrow and I haven't even figured out which programmes I'm going to be attending but by the grace of other authors who think kindly of my work I will be featured briefly in a couple of things:
1. Two of my poems will be read by the incredible spoken word poet Deborah Emmanuel on Love Radio, one of the programmes on the festival's radio station. This will happen tomorrow night, 30 October, between 9.30-9.50pm (Festival Pass only event).
Details on the festival radio here
2. I read one of my own poems and am interviewed by Marc Nair for Poetry Bites #6. The video was pre-recorded a month ago with all the appropriate social distancing measures in place, and is available after 4 November 9pm.
Details here
I also need to share this wonderful interview with Sharon Olds, by the incomparable Straits Times Arts Correspondent, Oliva Ho. I’ve been struggling a lot lately (and have also written a thing on this - but more on that next week) with the idea of intimacy within poetry - how much power then do you allow the audience to interpret from your writing, how people think they know you just from your poetry - and Olds’ speaks so eloquently on this subject.
Unlike many writers, Olds does not mind if people read her poems as autobiography. "It makes sense," she says, adding that she does not feel exposed by what she shares in her work.
But she stresses: "If the story of a poem is personal, or apparently personal - I think that isn't what's most interesting about a poem. I think that personal or not personal doesn't have to do with whether a poem works or not.
"Some poems might feel 'too personal' to some readers, others 'not personal enough' to others. For me, these are not the most important terms in which to talk about poems."
What matters to her, she says, are the myriad factors that go into making a poem come alive for the reader: passion and credibility; music, harmony and dissonance; relevance and originality.
From the time a poem is written - usually by hand with ball-point pen in a lined grocery-store notebook - to its successful fruition, she feels that it has gone over into the world of art.
"I am happy if someone likes it. But it's not exactly connected to me, as a diary entry might be. If it works as a poem, it has changed its life-form."